Al Qaeda leader promises new video ahead of 9/11 anniversary

Michael Taarnby, specialist in militant Islamism at the Danish Institute for International Studies, said the new video would be significant as "proof of life" but would probably be more scrutinized for clues to bin Laden's health than for its message.

"I don't think we'll find any major surprises -- the usual threats, the usual diatribes against the West," he said. "Osama bin Laden is an iconic figure now but it doesn't seem he has that much control over actual events or operations."

Evidence of this decentralization of Al Qaeda-linked activity can be found in two plots foiled in Europe in the past week, one in Germany and the other inDenmark. This week, as The Los Angeles Times reported, Germany said it arrested three men, two of them native Germans, who were planning bomb attacks on US military bases and US citizens inside the country. The Danes arrested a Pakistani and an Afghan in Copenhagen and said they'd also seized explosives.

After months of surveillance during which German police secretly replaced a stockpile of bomb chemicals with a weaker mixture, a SWAT team raided a vacation home in a wooded village in central Germany on Tuesday and arrested the trio, two of whom were German converts to Islam. One of the suspects grabbed an officer's gun, shooting him in the hand and suffering a cut on the head during a struggle.

The third suspect arrested was a Turkish Muslim living in Germany. The three allegedly underwent training last year at a terrorist camp in northern Pakistan run by the Islamic Jihad Union, an extremist network that broke away from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a longtime Al Qaeda ally, authorities said.

Although officials did not reveal links between the suspects in Germany and Denmark, both cases feature stockpiles of bombmaking materials and suspected links to Pakistan and Al Qaeda-related figures there.

Middle East Online quotes an expert on Al Qaeda as saying that the European plots appear certainly to be inspired by Al Qaeda, but are unlikely in his opinion to have major operational input from Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Apparently homegrown Muslim terror plots such as those uncovered in Germany and in neighboring Denmark this week will continue to be hatched for years to come, according to Danish expert Martin Harrow.

The Danish and the German plots appear to be 'homegrown', i.e. "not initiated or planned in the caves of Tora Bora in Afghanistan," said Harrow.

Danish and German security services both said there had been international cooperation in their respective anti-terror operations.

"This makes it plausible there may have been some kind of connection," said Harrow, commenting on speculation that there may have been a link between the Danish and German arrests.

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